Death to Needlessly Prolix Citation Guides – Judge Posner’s Alternative
The latest issue of the Yale Law Journal contains a supremely sane and caustic attack by Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on the tendency of the Blue Book (Uniform System of Citation) to proliferate increasing thickets of rules and increasingly trivial sub-rules.
In an earlier essay, Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 University of Chicago Law Review 1343 (1986), Judge Posner suggested four principles to guide the design of such a system:
“to spare the writer or editor from having to think about citation form,”
“to economize on space and the reader’s time,”
. . . [more]“to